April 2, 2008

Putting The New Media Reader together with Noah years ago meant amassing a huge variety of material from different sorts of sources. This diversity, and the sheer amount of text and images, made the book difficult to compile and edit. We knew that despite rather extreme efforts from us and from others at The MIT Press, there are minor errors throughout the book.

Well, it’s time for us to get to work on correcting these: There is to be a second printing of The New Media Reader. We’re asking for your help in tracking down literal and numeric nits – finding typos – and will thank in print (and here!) those who identify errors that we can fix. Just leave your full name in a comment below alongside mention of that specific error and the page (within the book or on the CD-ROM) it occurs on. That’s right, it’s yet another opportunity to tell us that we goofed, and how.

We are not working on a new edition of The New Media Reader, so we’re not dealing at all with questions of adding new articles, removing the ones you like the least, splitting the book into several volumes that are small enough to actually carry around, or even making any sentence-level changes. But if we wrote “1949” somewhere where we meant to write “1994,” or if you spot any other small-scale manglings that are worth changing and can be fixed without adding or removing any lines, we will ask The MIT Press to put such corrections in before the next printing is done.

We need your textual bug reports by the end of Saturday, April 12,Grand Text Auto time. (This will leave those in the US a few days to work on their taxes afterwards.) Obviously, anything you know about already and can drop in would be greatly appreciated. Or, if you’re reading from the book now anyway, or want an excuse to revisit an article, we would love to learn of any errors you notice.

(By the way, the curious errata sheet that provided the illustration here is from Steve McCaffrey’s exquisite Carnival, and you can read all about it if you like.)

Okay, Matt was the only one to send us a change by this means. We agree with his second suggestion (though the first and third are ones where we’ll have to agree to disagree). He’ll be given a thanks in the new printing’s acknowledgments.

For those who are curious, here are some other corrections identified for the new printing:

Back of the book:
The list of chapters running down the left side is in the wrong order. Currently it reads: 07 Engelbart, 08 Sutherland, 09 Burroughs. It should read: 07 Burroughs, 08 Engelbart, 09 Sutherland.

Chapter 3 (pages 55 and 57):
The words “this connection” should I read “this connexion”. (A mistaken partial regularization in the first printing.)

Chapter 21 (page 331):
The first note needs an additional capital letter, period, and square bracket. It currently reads: “[included in this volume (◊11)”. It should read: “[Included in this volume (◊11).]”.

Chapter 38 (pages 565-573):
The timeline (at the top of the odd numbered pages) is missing its line.

Chapter 44 (page 643):
The text “Hershman’s 1989-1990 Deep Contact” should be changed so the date range is “1984-1989″.